Militant Liberalism

MY AIM IN LIFE

The title takes me back to 1984, excuse the choice of year that my stream of consciousness has chosen for you and for me. I was eight years old and at that precise moment, about which I am talking now, I was confronted with this problem that every “Sarkaree School” educated boy (at least we lowlings think of it as education) has confronted during his elementary-school tenure. Every menopausal fourth grade teacher has this S&M fantasy of inflicting pain on their students by ordering them to write an essay on what they want to become in their respective futures. Sometime round in late 40s or early 50s some cliché riddled teaching manual, or should I call it Kama Sutra for Primary School Teachers, might have suggested this technique to gauge the abilities and ambitions of students. Generations of teachers getting-off on it, by the mid 80s, had turned it into a standard operating procedure for the fourth grade teachers. Anyway the essay was titled “My Aim in Life” and since its introduction in the pathetic lives of these pathetic students, generations of preteens had copied, learned, cited and recited this essay from equally clichéd sources such as elder siblings’ notebooks or “Essay Writing Made Easy” by Efzal Anwar Mufti.

Remaining within the mainstream I opted to be a fighter-pilot in this “seminal” work of mine and vowed to defend the aerial frontiers of my country. Needless to say, my elder brother had expressed the same wish a year or two earlier as had many of his class mates as this was the “hot job” in Zia’s little jihad world where like Hitler’s Nazi youth every adolescent had the dream of somehow getting into Army/Air Force and slaughtering hordes of filthy infidels having filthy thoughts about the land of the pure before embracing death and going to heaven. Time my dear readers has passed but the seeds of internal social and politico-religious discord that Zia had sown have brought out a crop of hatred and conflict that is being harvested in Pakistan since the mid 90s.

No matter how hard I try to isolate and alienate myself from Pakistan or let’s say my birth place, for Pakistan is nothing but a political variable that is subject to change depending on the global political climate, my thoughts revert back to it. For I might have U.S. nationality but the true nationality, my friends, is not that piece of paper handed out to me by the U.S. government but the colour of my skin that I can not change and would never be able to. No matter how hard they or you, for that matter, try to convince me: The reality is RACE. The lesson is always the same, namely, that race is everything. Without race there can be nothing except the slave wearing his master’s clothes, stealing his master’s proud name, adopting his master’s tongue, and living in the crumbling ruins of his master’s palace (Look at the Sub-continental, African and Latin American countries. Let’s just look at ourselves). It might be written in bold faced letters or it might be forbidden to be spoken out aloud; it remains engraved in the philosophy of life and no amount of propaganda can change it: Which by the way brings us back to Pakistan and its problems that I have failed to kick outside my mind and hence have decided to tackle head on instead of sticking my head in sand or up my ass for that matter.

That, come 2020 and there would not be a country called Pakistan can be a pretty safe bet. State department think-tanks think it to dissolve itself before 2015. Of course Pakistan is nothing but one of the exigencies of the post World War II political order dictated by the victorious forces of internationalism. There were countries named Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that are no more, there are countries like Moldova and Macedonia and Pakistan that have surfaced on the face of the map. In this post Second World War world the frontiers have become and have been highly malleable and Pakistan’s frontiers are no exception. Fabricated countries and nations are quickly losing their rights to exist as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and U.S.S.R. have found to their dislike and the only ideological state that exists and exercises its sovereignty remains and would remain to be Israel.

We, like many others, are the results of an illegitimate political affair and hence can only find solace in the fact that bastards can’t be blamed for what they are and have to carry on with the moral burden of the previous generations. We, my friends, are bastards in the true sense of the word, politically speaking that is, sticking to an idea only because we are a consequence of this very idea and hence permanently attached to it.

Anyway, to get sleepless nights over the problems of a country the chances of whose very existence in about a decade from now are rather slim really points out a few paradoxes. The only apology for these self-contradictory sentiments can be the fact that the annihilation of a country does not mean the disappearance of the very piece of land that was covered by the country’s frontiers and the love of the region finds alternative ways to manifests itself. The jist of all that has been said until now can hence be summarized as such: I am worried about what is going in the regions bounded by the frontiers of the country called Pakistan and even though I know that the country itself would be dysfunctional in some years time I want to do something about this social disease that is eating this society.

Now to the point that would form the heart of the matter. The biggest menace faced by Pakistan these days is the resurgence of militant Islam financed by the most-hypocritical of the regimes of Saudi Arab and Iran that are laden with oil and hence have the potential to lure public under the umbrella of their decadent reactionary ideologies: And when I say Saudi Arabia please count Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates; the bastions of Wahabi Islam, also in. Anyway the advent of militant Islam is a reality but not the totality of this wave of reaction can be attributed to oil-dripping money and I would go much further to assert that Saudi/Iranian wealth is not the primary reason for the ubiquitousness of this typical brand of Militant/medieval rather pre-medieval Islam.

The main reason is the fanaticism that this creed infests its adherents with: The fanaticism that empowers the followers of this creed with such a mental/psychological superiority that no amount of logic can change their beliefs and materialistic success that is the only base of every other alternative creed holds no value for them. Such is the morality of this new found independence that even life does not hold any significance for the followers of this movement. Surely a confession that imparts such a moral boost to its followers must, if the need arises, be tackled only by devising ideological means equally sound and perhaps equally, if not more, illogical. For the path of reason intrinsically is the preserver of life and surely when confronted by a theory based on the true life that starts after death, even in cursory comparison, can not be placed on the same philosophical plane.

It is then only laughable to see the liberal left (or should I call it the pseudo-left or pseudo-liberal-left) in Pakistan preaching reason to corrupt clerics whose bloated bank accounts are filled with petrodollar (by the way these accounts were flushed with dollars direct from U.S. not quite long ago) and to fanatic seminary students (the only qualification for being a seminary student in Pakistan is perhaps being the resident village-idiot in your respective village) that already belong to the least common denominator of the social and intellectual classes of the society and who are now infested by the ideas preached in the name of God and Prophet and invigorated with the promises of an after life of debauchery, luxe and lavishness that they can not even dream of. And look at their converse, the so-called intelligentsia, the over-educated over-privileged pseudo-intellectuals; the type that talks about poverty and illiteracy in air-conditioned saloons and tries to contest this degenerate ideological malaise by the false notions of humanity and egalitarianism. How come anybody remotely sane can even think about overcoming “reaction” with “hypocrisy”?

The only thing that would stop this rising tide of militant Islam would be nothing but militant liberalism: but do we have liberals amongst us that are willing to carry a Kalashnikov in the name of values of Egalitarianism and Social Justice? The simple and plain answer is “No”. Of course the first reason for this negative response is the obvious lack of militant liberals that would be willing to get out of their cosy libraries. Liberals who have every thing to lose that they have and that they stand for. On the other hand the enemy has death as his “Aim in Life” but the second and more potent and perhaps primary reason that points out to the origins of the lack of militant liberals in Pakistan and/or Third World is the fact that liberalism in these countries is just a pastime, a hobby for the rich that like every good capitalist are socialist in theory and like every great tyrant egalitarian in preaching. The liberalism of our so-called liberals is actually the continuation of that narcissist-upper-class-wet-dream in which the dreamer sees the whole society through the lens of his over-corpulent lifestyle and finds the answers to the gross social injustices in socialism and the different kinds of liberties associated to it. Deep, deep down in their hearts they know that all this talk of equality and liberty would not make a difference but their subconscious urges them to do it nevertheless as it surely does provide a cathartic treatment to that fatigue of that moral burden that the über-rich liberals of our society carry, albeit subconsciously.

The rising tide of reaction hence can only be stopped by emulating its own techniques how gruesome or grotesque they might be: For killing a beast demands stooping to a level of barbarism fit for the beast otherwise the beast would tear anything in its way apart or into parts. The moral fabric of the Pakistani society (the word Pakistani Society is so fake its making me puke but I have to use it for the reasons of comprehensibility) is being attacked by two different forces. Both of them equally relentless and ruthless and incessant in their respective onslaughts but surely the Militant Islam promises to bring nothing but death and destruction and above all intellectual impotence for the generations to come. The ascendance and capitulation to Militant Islam would be tantamount to submission to medieval Arab ideology and hence hegemony and would spell-out a cycle of intellectual drought similar to the one that the Arab invasions of Eight century brought to the shores of India and that so fossilized the decadent Hindu Religious philosophy in our Indian minds that even after thirteen hundred years we have been unable to align this religion imposed upon us with our natural social life and hence have been unable to achieve the empowerment that a healthy religion offers its adherents. This second attempt of Arabianazation of the indigenous peoples of the sub-continent in the name of Islam would retard or rather root out what little under-currents of free thought this society has had able to muster up.

All this, dear readers, compels me to re-look at that fourth grade essay that I had written, in fact copied and in which I had desired to defend the frontiers of my country. After all these years I have known that no amount of defending these frontiers can save the country if the internal thought processes, by their very inexistence, are unable to justify the so-called independence imposed on the people because men like us, unworthy of independence, though they cry for it ever so loudly, will either remain subject or will quickly relapse into subjection should they by some unlucky circumstance obtain what they could only misuse: Hence the redefinition of my “Aim in Life” ladies and gentleman. The ambition is now to found a militant liberal organization that would mirror the brutality of Militant Islam just to root it out from our society…

“And when it is said to them: ‘Do not cause war and destruction on Earth’. They say: ‘We are only making peace’.”


Ahmad Akhtar Hayat
07-05-2007